To all those who think Iraq is a distraction in the greater war on terror, Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri would beg to differ.

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By JD Johannes

Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio, and, yours truly, have all spent considerable time in Iraq.

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The Department of Defense delivers a quarterly report to Congress entitled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” (MSSI).  The August 2006 installment was published last week. 

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by Fouad Ajami
Free Press, copyright © 2006
Reviewed by Richard Nadler

In “The Foreigner’s Gift,” Professor Fouad Ajami has produced less a history of Operation Iraqi Freedom than a psychological portrait of the cultures involved.  America’s attempt to “defy gravity” – to establish a functioning democracy in the heart of the Arab world – has encountered three hard cultural facts: Sunni rejection, Kurdish acceptance, and Shi’ite reticence.  Ajami clarifies each attitude through interviews, biographical portraits, and historical review.

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Baghdad’s sharp July spike in civilian deaths prompted two major responses from the elected Iraqi government and its coalition allies.  One was Operation Forward Together, an intensive “clear and hold” operation in Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods.  The other was an Iraqi army initiative to defang Shi’ite militias south of Baghdad.

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The Reuters vehicle story is an abosulte fraud.

A complete and total fraud.

And a bad one at that.

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As everybody from the President to the Lance Corporals say, ‘when a terrorist lights a fire cracker, its news, but when we take down a terrorist cell, no one hears about it.’

This new battlespace is not fought on a fixed terrain.  In war, it is often said that terrain and technology are neutral, i.e., night sights don’t know who is wearing them, the ground doesn’t care who is walking on it and a concrete wall will stop rounds from an AK-47 or an M-4.

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by Richard Nadler

One certainty by which American news viewers can set their clocks is the unremitting hostility of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to America’s attempt to plant democracy in the Middle East.  On Sunday, Aug. 27, watchers of Late Edition could see Blitzer interview – no, hector – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  The segment, which ran 3500 words in transcript, provides a remarkable window into CNN’s freakish hatred not only of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but of our Iraqi allies in that fight.

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Last we looked at a Poll of Iraqis who actually live in Iraq.

The Iraqi news media’s effect on the poll was obvious in one question.

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The experts on how things are going in Iraq are not former State Department officials, former CIA officials who may never have set foot in the country.

The experts are not Senators who have taken junkets or the various other bloviators who populate the green rooms of cable news outlets.

They are the Iraqis themselves.

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